Messiaen Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus

“Contemporary Regards: Contemplations on Time and the Sacred”
Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus

Join us for an extraordinary journey into the world of Olivier Messiaen's "Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus," where music, faith, synesthesia, colors, poetry, and birdsongs unite in a breathtaking celebration of transcendence, creativity and devotion.

One of the twentieth century’s greatest achievements for solo piano, the Vingt Regards is a cycle of twenty meditations uniting the sacred and the human. Written in Paris from March to September of 1944, near the end of WWII, as the city was being liberated from the German occupation, the cycle was originally intended to be a set of twelve short piano pieces to accompany Maurice Toesca's poetry on the Nativity in a radio production. The final work grew to be a cycle of deeply spiritual devotion and inspiration consisting of four main themes—the theme of God, theme of the Star and the Cross, the theme of Chords, and the theme of Mystical Love—but it also contains birdsongs, Indian and non-retrogradable rhythms, neumes, synesthesia, and numerology. It encompasses an enormous range of expressions, from tenderness to thunderous power, from mystical to the transcendental and glorious.

My engagement with this work is deeply personal and historically rooted. Yvonne Loriod, who is the dedicatee of this work and Messiaen's foremost interpreter and muse, invited me to study with her as part of my Fulbright scholarship upon hearing my recordings. Her generous encouragements, detailed teaching, and deep insights into his creative, musical and spiritual world shaped my artistic formation.

This project to perform and record the Vingt Regards cycle aim to present Messiaen's twenty meditative pieces with poetry and vivid arts and captivating imageries inspired by his synesthesia—bringing Messiaen’s message of faith, wonder, and renewal to a broader public, as a bridge between tradition and modernity, devotion and artistry, intellect and spirituality, and serve as a tribute to Yvonne Loriod and Olivier Messiaen - one of the greatest 20th century composers who influenced generations of musicians and composers worldwide.